Sherlock Holmes, the protagonist of BBC’s Sherlock, based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective stories of the same name, is the Superman both for intellectuals and otherwise. The aspect about him that endears more than his alchemic ability to crack cases is his role as a savior, a protector of his near and dear ones. The series would’ve been bloodless and only a cerebral exercise that drew in a selected upper-crust of the intelligentsia had it sapped out sentiment, and creator Mark Gatiss and writer Steven Moffat wisely avoid that. That’s precisely why the series has become so popular amongst audiences and, in a way, is endangering itself over time. The last season (season 3) teetered on the saccharine by unwisely putting breaks on the mystery, Sherlock’s ultimate takeaway, to camp on the chemistry between the series’ recurring characters. I hope the mistake isn’t repeated in the upcoming season, predicted to hit televisions by 2016.

It is the first two seasons are the tenderloins of the whole series, brilliant because the case is the cake here while the chemistry is the cherry and not the other way round. The former is stacked with puzzle-solving, but it isn’t one that invites audiences to a guessing game because that’s Sherlock’s territory. We’re left at his mercy as he deconstructs the crime scene and his suspects to make observations, notice patterns and ultimately form an assumption that mostly turns out right. This is evidenced in the first episode, titled A Study in Pink based on a story of the same name, in which the then unknown consultant detective gets almost every first impression on Watson correct, including the fact that the latter was gifted a phone by his sibling; he only gets the sibling’s gender wrong and unless you’re a total sod who’s critical of just about everything on planet Earth and beyond, you’ll be super impressed by Holmes’ almost supernatural abilities.

There’s usually an unsolved problem which persist throughout the episode and put things in place once figured out, for example, a name (A Study in Pink) a cryptic number (The Blind Banker), a neglected case (The Great Game), a password (Scandal in Belgravia), an acronym (Hound of Baskervilles). And although the characters and certain situations may seem familiar, Moffat, who also stars in the series as Sherlock’s elder brother Mycroft Holmes, has worked expertly to revise the storylines, make them compact to work as ninety minute episodes and revamp scenarios to the present world (instead of basing the stories as Watson’s personal writings as in Doyle’s books, for example, the series instead turns Watson into a popular blogger whose articles on their cases is what gives both Watson and Holmes popularity). I’ve always preferred Christie’s works to Doyle’s because even though both end up fooling readers by concealing some information until the climax, at least Christie’s works allows readers to participate in guessing games by throwing in irresistible clues at certain points while Doyle’s only rely on Sherlock’s lengthy deductions on how the murder was committed rather than who actually did it. On visual medium, however, it’s exhilarating to watch how differently Sherlock perceives the same scene to come up with extraordinary conclusions.

Moffat strength lies in not dumbing down the series for television audiences while retaining a widespread appeal. Sherlock’s observations are just as sharp, even more so now that the latest developments in science and technology are taken into account. His character himself is far more sharp-tongued than the Shelocks we’ve seen before, whether in Doyle’s series or the earlier BBC series or the cinematic adaptation starring Robert Downey Jr. His insults and jabs hurt as much as Irene Adler’s whip (Alder, a professional dominatrix, is the woman he has a brief fling with in Scandal in Belgravia) and just about no one’s spared, not his buddy Watson nor his landlady Mrs. Hudson nor the Detective Inspector Lestrade nor his lab assistant Molly and certainly not the suspects or those who think they know better. Much friction, especially between Holmes and Watson, stems from Holmes’ cold, detached, asocial attitude as well as his inability to sympathize. It’s both enormously entertaining and touching to watch Holmes humanize through the series and until season 3, where goodness is forced onto him to the series’ detriment, the transition seems natural. Moffat also infuses quintessentially British humor, sophisticated, wry and pointed, to the script which is best witnessed in Sherlock’s jabs, his interactions with Holmes, his repartee with Mycroft and his small talk with Mrs. Hudson.

Seasons 1 and 2 are unmissable, the highlights being ‘A Study in Pink’, ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ and ‘Hound of Baskervilles’. Season 3 goes out of the way to be a crowd-pleaser, paying homage to the series’ fandom as well as to minor cases from Doyle’s series, and is criminally lackluster by comparison. In fact, one can skip Season 3 entirely by just keeping three things to memory – a. Sherlock’s alive b. his arch nemesis from the first 2 seasons Jim Moriarty is back and c. Watson’s married to Mary, a former assassin. Both Gatiss and Moffat need to reshift their focus back to the cases because in the absence of interesting cases, detective stories lose their novelty value rapidly and even the presence of a great cast can’t save it for long.

Both Jeremy Brett and Robert Downey’s portrayals of Sherlock have been strong and distinctive and for this series, its British actor Benedict Cumberbatch who takes on the detective’s role. Cumberbatch’s pale bony face, curly hair and tall and lean frame all suit his character’s distinctive appeal to a tee. This guy’s best playing emotionally aloof characters who stand out from the crowd and I’m sure he didn’t find it too big a challenge to find the right tone to his version of Sherlock; the unaired pilot episode, re-filmed with better production values and script alterations before being televised, in fact reveals he only had to get a shade or two nastier to become the Sherlock we’ve come to love. There is evidence of humanity in this Sherlock and if you look deeply into his eyes, you’ll catch it, and this is what differs him from his elder brother, who is more stoic and unpleasant than the former, which is why Sherlock’s way easier to root for. Both Cumberbatch and Moffat channel this difference in their characters which is applaud worthy. Martin Freeman, as Dr. Watson, is very amusing (his disaster dates in the first two seasons are especially a hoot) and charming; the promise of a homosexual bonding between Holmes and Watson, hinted in the first episode, doesn’t really pick up but it results in some hilarious quips and awkward moments that are a treat.

There is much to admire about the series’ cinematography, editing, production design and music. Jump cuts are used judiciously especially from Sherlock’s point-of-view as he zip-zaps through the various clues and takes mental notes, which appear as text on screen. It’s fascinating to enter Sherlock’s head, sometimes via POV shots and text, sometimes by actually placing him at the location he’s musing about and crisp camerawork and editing are to be credited for this. As for the production design, Gatiss puts its perfectly when he says ‘it fetishizes Modern London the way the period versions fetishize Victorian London’. The music, with violins frequently used, along with the jumpy camerawork is elemental in adding to the much needed pacing and tension. The most memorable tune, composed by David Arnold and Michael Price, is the one playing during the opening credits, which wonderfully encapsulates the tone of the series – dramatic, mysterious and exciting.

The best way to describe to end this review would be to use Irene Adler’s password that she’s kept to unlock her phone, which Holmes only decodes at the end of The Scandal in Belgravia after realizing its kept after the person whom she truly loves – I am ‘Sherlocked’.

Note: These reviews got deleted from ourvadodara.in, a site I no longer work for. So am posting the missing reviews here.

Jai Ho

Rating: 20%

Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s Chief Minister, proclaimed himself an anarchist recently. Were Salman Khan elected chief minister (i.e. based on the impression I get watching his character in Jai Ho, which seems like a personal statement from the actor), the capital would’ve been run by a psychopathic animal.

The health care industry would have an overfull demand, with every single room taken up by the hapless victims of his merciless pounding. The municipal corporation would be permanently on its heels, mopping up the literally bloody mess off the streets. Women, unless unattractive or disabled, would be eve-teased in full public view. It’s a fetching Gujarati lass this time who’s the butt of all jokes for wearing pink panties; she’s nicknamed ‘Pinky’, get it? Because she wears “pink” panties? I cracked a smile just once for it was a young kid who coined the name, but the film inexplicably made it a running gag with no variation whatsoever. Severe groaning ensued on my part.

The cabinet would be dolled with beautiful gals and strapping lads, all newcomers from the entertainment industry. The ‘groundbreaking’, ‘humanist’ proposals would be championed greatly whilst campaigning, only to be forgotten during power. Of course, like a quintessential politician, he’d fund reminder ads on television to hoodwink citizens into thinking that progress is taking place.

Other predictions: motocross racing in the midst of traffic would be encouraged. No FIR reports shall be filed for assault and murder of the party’s enemies. With the boost in killings, population shall be reduced to one-third. The military would barge into scene in tanks and stand up for the leader when he’s in trouble, leaving behind its national duties. The capital would turn into a hell-hole.

Cinemarc turned a hellhole for me when they played Jai Ho, an attempt billion times lazier than Prakash Jha’s Satyagraha at raising social consciousness. But a few predictions can be made.

The money would be recovered in the opening weekend itself. Trade analysts would throw their hats in the air when it enters the two-hundred crore club. Taran Adarsh would marvel its ‘ambitions’ and ‘entertainment quotient’, and use ghisa-pita adjectives to extol Salman and his team. Tabu (from Chandni Bar to this) would henceforth appear in similar, masala films and less in quality productions. And Daisy Shah, a talented dancer no doubt, shall find no takers.

Sohail Khan, Salman’s younger brother and the film’s director, remarked in an interview that all hit films need not be good ones, adding that he sincerely worked to ensure that a quality project is begotten. He’s made commercially successful romantic comedies comedies (Pyaar Kiya to Darna Kya, Hello Brother) before, and with Jai Ho, he intends to prove himself a ‘serious’ director. Did he seriously think this baasi roti of a project would help foster social awareness and make the world a better place?

I hated the film’s pretentions. Its concept, that one man does a good deed for another and in turn urges three good deeds from him towards others, has trickled down from Kevin Spacey-Helen Hunt starrer Hollywood film Pay It Forward, where a eleven year old ‘kid’ began the movement (one can overlook part of the farfetchedness when the concept revolves around a kid). Then, writer-director AR Murugadoss borrowed the concept for his Telugu film called Stalin, a Chiranjeevi starrer. Dilip Shukla, a writer (he currently has no Wikipedia page, and I bet he wouldn’t in the future), looked to Stalin for inspiration more than Pay It Forward only to retain the dhishoom-dhishoom, maar-kaat, gandi-baat Indianized flavor.

Salman Khan was roped in as protagonist Jai Agnihotri for the film complements his philanthropic image; most would know he’s the founder of the popular ‘Being Human’ charity initiative. That Sohail Khan was appointed director reeks of nepotism. Frankly speaking, it wouldn’t make a difference if one Altaf Ahmed or Chintu Zhaveri was made director, for the script is maddeningly directionless. In marketing, there’s a term called ‘rifle approach’ which refers to accurate market segmenting, targeting and product positioning by marketers. Contrary to this is the ‘shotgun’ approach, where strategies are haphazard and aimed at everyone. Jai Ho splatters the film’s core message every now and then.

One performs a good deed; the other says “Thank You”. The first then says “No Thank You. Instead, help three people and tell them to help three others and so on”. We hear this on ten different occasions in the film, the repeatability reminding us of secondary missions from Spiderman II videogame, where Spidey would say the same damn thing after saving somebody.

The film has little else to say. So it crams in a done-to-death good guy vs corrupt neta angle to fill out its screenplay. The concept itself could’ve been an ad campaign (and maybe an effective one). What else….oh yes, there are about five song and dance sequences – three in the beginning with watchable choreography, a predictable slow romantic number a few minutes post interval and one embarrassingly pointless Gujarati dance number later.

I’ll tell you what – retain that two hundred rupees you were planning to expend on this film and buy a Being Human t-shirt instead. Pass this message to three others. Everyone’s happy, the charity gets its donations and the society is served.

Miss Lovely

Rating: 80%

Retro disco beats partnered with matching visualizations play around the opening credits, where we learn that jack-of-all-trades-and-master-too-yay! Ashim Ahluwalia multitasked as director, scriptwriter, editor and sound designer (have I left out anything?). A pair of eyes, large and red, then glares at us. It’s soon established that the scene we’re watching is a B-horror film inside the film. Similarly, Ahluwalia’s debut narrative feature film (having made a feature-length documentary called John & Jane in 2006, and a couple of short films and installation art) is spectator to a variety of tales and themes.

In broad terms, and as hinted perhaps in trailers and the film’s thunder-thigh baring poster, it witnesses the transformation of C-grade film industry between late eighties and early nineties, but it isn’t Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. It glimpses at sex, alcohol, career rivalry, albeit not in a cheesy, caricature-heavy Madhur Bhandarkar manner we’ve grown accustomed to.

It espies almost with cold indifference the gradual depredation of school-girl innocence in rotten company, but it isn’t Raj Purohit’s Sixteen, a film on loss of innocence which surprised everyone after snagging five nominations at the Screen Awards (and stumped me completely for it was picked for best story and editing over Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus).

It occasionally catches a love story in its sleazy setting, but escapes the ‘love triumphing over all odds’ cliché. Ashim Ahluwalia to film commentator and critic Sean Malin in an interview that he wants to ‘drop that recognition the audience inherently has with this kind of (i.e. love) story. Two brothers fighting over a girl it sees, but there are no traces of ‘Meri Brother Ki Dulhan’, the Imran Khan-Ali Zafar-Katrina Kaif starrer. It certainly watches a confluence of two genres: noir and pulp, except it narrowly avoids getting categorized either into a ‘Coen Brothers’ film or a ‘Tarantino’ film. Ahluwalia reveals he drowned himself in works by Japanese New Wave auteurs, including Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura and Seijun Suzuki, about whom I have no idea, and newer artistes such as Takashi Miike (I saw his stomach-churning Odishon when I was sixteen) and Wong Kar Wai (Chungking Express, his dreamy, dazzling work was screened at Fine Arts faculty of MS University during their December film fest). It definitely can’t be termed a satire or parody, even when it’s replete with footage from C-grade movies and happenings behind-the-scenes.

The camera hardly films from a subjective perspective. It films the love story from a distance and at odd angles. In fact, it devotes way lesser screen time to lovey-dovey scenes than any conventional Bollywood or Hollywood movie. Ashim Ahluwalia’s (remember the name) Miss Lovely defiantly speaks ‘Categorize me, I’ll defy every label!’ (borrowed the line from singer Janelle Monae’s single Q.U.E.E.N – check that song too). This film deliberately wants you to feel uncomfortable, like you’ve been kicked by Bruce Lee in the stomach. If you get a bitter aftertaste just as the closing credits spill in, the film has done its job. A brutally cold, detached, and screwed up take on a simplistic storyline, Miss Lovely is the holy s**t film that Ajay Bahl’s BA Pass failed to be last year. And one of the best films you’ll get from the Indian New Wave cinema and absolutely one of the finest that could release in multiplexes this year.

The world of C-grade cinema as depicted here seems sad, dismal and drained of humanity. Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddique, yes, the same guy in hits like Gangs of Wasseypur and The Lunch Box. Why aren’t people flocking to see this film?) wants to opt out when elder brother Vicky (Anil George), a director of such films consents to add adult (i.e. porn) content to get wider audience response. He wanders dispiritedly through parties and shooting sessions like a protagonist of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini’s film. Pinky (Niharika Singh), an aspiring actress yet in school, leaves him lovestruck. Despite having no money, he promises to cast her as the lead actress in his obviously fictitious film which he calls Miss Lovely. She hangs out with him, but is discomfited by Vicky, who also sets his hungry eyes on her. There is a Bollywood-ish ‘darar’ between the two bhais, but the film repudiates falling into any convention.

Usually, people tend to ask “How were the performances?” but that won’t work here. The characters are depersonalized; they function like objects, set in to fulfill the film’s purpose. Outtakes and real footage have been included into the final product. The soundtrack choice includes scores by Illiyaraaja, disco producer Biddu, as well as rare works by Italian composers Egisto Macchi and Piero Umiliani.

With such violations of conventions, it’s no wonder the audience response as of now has been pathetic. Cinemarc as well as PVR cancelled their shows, and Inox played it to an audience of ten. All ten remained till the end, fixated on the radical work playing in front of their eyes. If you are patient enough to look at how it challenges itself by bending its approach towards the art of filmmaking, genre and narrative, I guarantee you’ll yearn for such films in the future.

Dedh Ishqiya

Rating: 50%

Before I begin my review, I’d like to tell this: The mellisonant verses of a shaayari won’t appeal to the unaccustomed eyes of a child – that’s one thing parents should consider before bringing a child below ten to a screening of Dedh Ishqiya. The languid pacing coupled with sexual content are two valid reasons to leave them at a day care center instead of letting the little children suffer. A tiny kid sat next to me imploring his parents to take him home. He wasn’t in for Madhuri’s beauty, neither was he moved by the shaayari, nor was he hungry to watch a prostitute humping Arshad Warsi. It was almost inhumane to force him to sit through the entire duration. Okay, now moving on to the review:

Although a good deal of words are spoken, Dedh Ishqiya falls short on exploring its characters’ dilemmas as they betray and double-cross each other without batting an eyelid. The first half dawdles through mildly humorous moments, Urdu poetry and doting proclamations and reserves much of the plot development for post-intermission. While this is a common trait among ‘arty’ or ‘offbeat’ films, i.e. centering on a given situation/scene for unusually long periods of time without moving the plot ahead, the successful ones make their intentions clear from the opening shot. I cannot compute a film that includes a scene of enchanting poetry and then follows it with a ridiculous, almost off-color product placement for Apple IPhone 5. Films low on storyline compensate it with lengthy monologues, impressive repartee and philosophical musings both using dialogues as well as cinematography and editing. Tarantino has forged a career scripting fabulous epic-length monologues for his characters. Dedh Ishqiya’s screenplay, written by Vishal Bharadwaj, Abhishek Chaubey and Gulzar, three notable figures in Bollywood, doesn’t boast of stand-out writing, in spite of its successful endeavor at invoking the poetic lilt of shaayari. Pleasantly unexpected moments do appear, but they’re rare and fleeting; in one scene, the film’s protagonists and antagonists stand in the same spot all through the night pointing their guns at each other without a single fire – its cleverly amusing, but a follow-up ‘awesome’ moment takes a good deal of time to arrive. Until then, it’s either Arshad getting horny on Huma or a puerile castration joke.

Now imagine if the film had spotlighted instead on Madhuri Dixit’s character’s motivations. Her character Begum Para, a reclusive widow residing in an antiquated haveli, could’ve possessed more shades than Paris Hilton’s entire wardrobe (saw Sofia Copolla’s fantastic Bling Ring, which filmed a portion in Hilton’s personal residence). Instead of giving us access to her thoughts throughout the film, Abhishek Chaubey goes for a ‘big reveal’ moment that would ultimately lead to an account of her back story. The reveal is a no-brainer for anyone who’s seen Ishqiya (we learn her companion Muniya, played by Huma Qureshi, is conspiring to kidnap her. Now guess who the main conspirator turns out to be?); in fact, the only major change is the location. Shifting its base to the Mahmudabad, there is much to be admired about the production design. It helps Dixit to ease into the scenery and set hearts on fire as the nawab sahiba hosting a swayamvar for herself. The actress permits the camera to capture the scintillating glow on her expressive face. Her beauty may enchant throughout, but what’s problematic sometimes is her attempt to stand out in every frame, which often works against the character’s nature. Para claims she’s abandoned her passion of dancing, but when left alone in her chamber in one scene, the stimulating mood and music revive her long-lost love and she breaks out in the most graceful fashion, dancing ‘to the cameras’. Unless it’s in a dream sequence, it wouldn’t be easy for anybody to achieve the feat of dancing so well after years of discontinuation. The kalai ka moch, kamar ka dard and cramps will soon show up if dormant muscles are subject to rigorous movements all of a sudden. The scene needed the gradual crescendo of choreography that we saw in the otherwise hopeless 1983 Hollywood hit Flashdance.

Like Sherlock and Watson, Khalujan (Naserruddin Shah) and Babban (Arshad Warsi) make an interesting pair; you should know, by the way, that Sherlock the series is returning soon on television. Khalujan is naturally charming, eloquent, poetic and gentlemanly while Babban is more coarse-mannered. In spite of knowing this, when a repulsive-looking small-time don named Mushtaq bhai orders them to rob a jewellery store, its Babban who impersonates as a nawab while Khalujan plays his servant. It’s a treat to watch a servant speak so fluently and assertively to the store owner, with the nawab barely uttering a word. After their plan bungles, both make a run for it and Khalujan mysteriously vanishes, leaving Babban to face Mushtaq, who’s itching to cut off his ‘little boy’ (that’s how the subtitles put it). Babban escapes from Mushtaq’s clutches as well, and later finds out Khalujan is perfectly fine and on a trip to woo Para playing a dhongi poetry-loving nawab. Threat in Mahmudabad turns up in the form of Jaan Mohammad (Vijay Raaz), another dhongi poetry-waxing nawab (although this man doesn’t even write his own poetry. He’s kidnapped Noor Mohammad Italvi, an actual Nawab (Manoj Pahwa), and kept him captive to write couplets for him day and night.

Both Shah and Warsi share a magic together that they lack with the leading ladies, especially Warsi, who transforms into Uday Chopra from the Dhoom series in his scenes with Huma. And Raaz is relishing as the villains with toadying hyenas in the form of henchman surrounding him and ‘wah-wahing’ everything he utters. And as the writer is Bharadwaj, the character dynamics echo those of Shakespeare’s plays (Raaz as the love-lorn, reckless lover, Madhuri’s own selfish intentions, Qureshi’s scheme etc). The film still disappoints by failing to depict their inner conflict, and another thing that bothered me was that the characters, including the ones newly introduced for the sequel, play their roles as if they’re continuing from an unknown, unreleased prequel everybody missed. I think a lack of exposition is to be blamed for this. The final product seems like a work still in developmental stage that needs more tweaking, more polishing before it deserves a wah-wah.

Suppose you’re reading a crime novel, a murder mystery set on a secluded island. There are four prime suspects and one includes a rambling alcoholic with bloodshot eyes and a ghastly appearance. This man claims to have committed a thousand odd crimes in his past and the story also explicitly suggests his animosity towards the victim. Now would it in any manner stun you if this very man is found to be the murderer after a few hundred pages or so? Most probably not, unless you are so non-judgmental you’ll not find any reason to doubt even an ‘alcoholic with bloodshot eyes, a ghastly appearance and hostility towards the victim’.

Now tell me this, what is so startling about a creepy doll that’s possessed by the ghost of a ‘deranged Satan-worshipping cult member’? Now, a demonic doll possessed by an evil spirit may be blood-curling spooky if it were in real life but on film, that too one releasing in late 2014 where films have successfully shocked by making the source of fear unknown, the idea comes off as unoriginal. Another problem is that the entity is all skin and bone in terms of characterization. In James Wan’s Conjuring, which introduced the Annabelle doll fleetingly, kept shut in ghost-hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren’s museum, the spirit at least had a story to tell. While I wasn’t a fan of the film itself, I can say that at least their ghost didn’t seem like a throw-in. This one, thanks to lazy writing, feels more like a shadow of a ghost and such a figure can never be terrifying. If you’ve read Strange Robert Louis Stevenson’s Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you’ll know exactly what I’m trying to say; what made Mr. Hyde so fearfully enigmatic a character was the vivid description provided about him through secondhand encounters. Omit the details, and just put ‘Mr. Hyde was a loathsome boor feared by every townsman’, there’s hardly an impact created.

Now, while may sound ludicrous, but even ghosts have a modus operandi and horror is effective only when the boundaries within which a supernatural entity works to spook the human characters is well-defined. For instance, in the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger had infinite scope to haunt his victims but his playground was restricted to his character’s dreams. So audiences would dread the moment a character heard Freddie’s menacing voice or sensed something distorted about his environment, which implied that she or he had fallen asleep. Blair Witch Project, a modern horror classic filmed entirely using handicams, had an invisible cause of fear but one that haunted at only at nighttime.

Annabelle meanwhile takes generous liberties with the spirit of Annabelle Higgins, the runaway daughter of the Higgins family who returns only to kill her parents, is shot dead by the police along with her boyfriend after the two Satan-worshipping outcasts attack the film’s protagonists, a pregnant Mia and her husband John Form, both neighbors of the Higgins, and possesses one of Mia’s (most repulsive-looking) dolls, newly gifted to her by John. Annabelle toys with the kitchen stove and starts a fire. After Mia and John change homes post their daughter Lia’s birth, she re-appears despite John disposing her of at Mia’s insistence. It haunts Mia day and night, which John, a doctor, at first attributes to post-traumatic stress disorder.

There are two effective ‘horror’ scenes in the film. One includes Mia’s encounter with Annabelle’s spirit in her new home, where Annabelle firstly assumes the form of her young self as Mia looks on stupefied from another room and suddenly transforms to her freakish adult form as she dashes into the room Mia is in. The other one is more elaborate, and involves Mia, a dimly-lit storage unit in a basement and an elevator that refuses to leave it.

The preposterous, rule-bending moment comes later, when a priest, who role until then involved doling out platitudes intermittently, is brought in to deal with the situation. The priest, Father Perez, takes the doll in his possession so he can ‘work on it’ (a priest has been a staple of every horror film involving demonic possession, none bettering Father Damian Karras, the priest in Exorcist who actually had depth in terms of character) but meets with a supernaturally-caused accident. Now here comes the incredulous ‘fear-for-fear’s-sake’ (for convenience, I’ll call it FFFS) moment that may frighten at first glance but upon first thought seems incredibly force, more like a foolish desperate ‘whatever it takes’ attempt on director John R. Leonetti and writer Gaby Dauberman’s part to incite fear.

Father Perez survives the accident and informs Mia’s husband John about the spirit’s maleficence while he’s hospitalized. He phones Mia, who’s at home with Evelyn, a middle-aged bookseller who intuits her trauma and voluntarily comes to her help. Before he can warn her, there’s a knock at the door. Mia looks through the peephole and finds Father Perez with his back turned towards her. She opens the door and calls him out. But we know that Father Perez is in the hospital with John. So who’s this fellow? It obviously is the spirit disguised as Father Perez out of the blue to momentarily spook us before vanishing to spook us as Annabelle or the Demon, the way it is intended to spook. It’s fairly obvious that this never-seen-before ability of the spirit is nothing but the redundant, desperate rule-breaking FFFS moment I was speaking of.

Annabelle could’ve worked out well, especially as it included a decent enough set-up – the event happens in 1967, there’s news of the Manson family’s arrest, both John and Mia profess love and support for one another, and their conversation doesn’t seemed canned, like most horror film conversations do. The film could’ve done so much by exploring the extent to which the spirit of Annabelle tests the couple’s loyalty and support towards each other. But John is hardly utilized in the film, and the character of Mia could’ve had more potential; she’s fighting to save her baby so surely she could’ve reacted more passionately. Annabelle Wallis, who plays Mia, doesn’t bring the vigor that a person like Mia needs while facing such drastic situations. She does timidity and helplessness well, but when it comes to fighting back, her face needed to display that resistance and will-power. Ward Horton, playing her husband John, is passable but as I said above, his character is grossly underutilized.

And then there’s poor Evelyn, played by Alfre Woodard, who displays such an incredible level of selflessness towards the end of the film. Her character’s treatment in the film’s climactic moment (which I shan’t reveal for fear of being unbraided for spilling spoilers) is totally WTF-level absurd. The problem over here again is the underwritten narrative. Dramatic climaxes work only if we’re well acquainted with our characters, and this can happen only if they are well-defined and for this, the filmmaker and writer need to give them more time, especially if they wish to do pack everything – good storyline, deep characterization, big themes, jump scares as well as real horror – in a single film.

Annabelle, trying to do everything within its compact time frame of 90 minutes, fails. The end result is Anna-bleh.

Note: These reviews got deleted from ourvadodara.in, a site I no longer work for. So am posting the missing reviews here.

Hasee To Phasee

Drug addiction: not exactly an endearing quirk. Kym, played by Anne Hathaway, accidently crashed her car into the lake killing her brother in Rachel Getting Married. For Violet, played by acting titan Meryl Streep, it led to her husband’s suicide and her daughters abandoning her. John Belfort lost his senses popping Quaaludes in Wolf of Wall Street. In the real world, such names as Amy Winehouse and Philip Seymour Hoffman have already succumbed to drugs while Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes are dangerously close. And nearly half the US is gunning for Justin Bieber’s deportation after the arrest and drug raid.

In Hasee To Phasee, Parineeti Chopra gets a sugar rush in one scene and often turns berserk loading herself with antidepressants. Quite an unpleasant case to hang around with, and I guess writer Harshavardhan Kulkarni attached this idiosyncrasy to her character just to steer clear of conventional romantic comedies. He wants us to chuckle as she stares bug-eyed and open-mouthed while sitting in a car or dragging a couple of ladies to her father’s office. Her oddity is so repellant we begin pitying not just her but every hapless soul who crosses path with her. Ranbir Kapoor’s goofiness in Besharam somehow charmed me. Here I desperately wanted a couple of doctors to send Chopra off to a rehab. But since its Bollywood, we are to believe that true love shall cure her addiction once and for all. So a dapper Sidharth Malhotra is brought in to bear with her nonsense for a while and then fall under her creepy spell. Supporting characters playing his relatives remain puzzled by her rather than showing concern. The film expects us to be humored by her antics, and then feel bad when an appropriate ‘sad’ music is cued. It also takes a cruel pleasure by throwing in a plastic Adah Sharma; last seen in the dreadful Hum Hai Rahee Car Ke, she bores us with another forgettable performance as Chopra’s elder sister and Malhotra’s fiancé. There are incredibly annoying subplots involving family members which again, are written with the intention of tickling our funny bone. My bone of contention is that a) Parineeti act was passed off as comedy and b) everybody involved actually thought this film to be funny.

This should be inducted to a special category of films with ‘n/a’ humor. I could not identify it, but positive reviews from a number of other publications suggest presence of wit and hilarity. I left the theatre scratching my head, and so did fellow patrons at Cinemarc. Not one paused to catch the song played during the end credits. I guess we were on the side who thought this was the most unromantic film of the year.

Anurag Kashyap, Karan Johar and Vikramaditya Motwane (director of Lootera) produced this film alongwith Vikas Bahl, which comes as the biggest surprise. Didn’t they find anything amiss in Kulkarni’s script – the lack of humor, the underwhelming characterization, the random subplots? It’s marriage time for Nikhil (Malhotra, and I’d like to note that I referred Wikipedia to get his name even though I saw the film only a few hours before), an event planner who borrows great sums from his future father-in-law. His dad is a retired IPS officer while his mother is a South Indian. His luxurious house teems with guests, including a foreigner. His problem is lack of commitment. He has an on and off relationship with Adah (I’m sorry but I just can’t recollect her character name). That’s Nikhil in a nutshell. Adah is a model and an aspiring actress. That’s just about everything we know about her.

Parineeti’s Meeta is more complicated, and apart from my plaint that this didn’t work as comedy, another problem is that the film gives us little time to understand her. This would’ve made more sense as Meeta’s story, and it’s a pity she’s reduced to a set of tics and sillies instead of a three-dimensional character. We know she’s super intelligent but a weirdo. She’s pampered by her father but kicked out by her family after demanding money for her project work, much to her father’s dismay, who gets a heart-attack after the incident but survives. She goes to China to complete her PhD, sets up a lab there and then gets back to India, this time to steal from her own home. But she’s not welcome by anyone, including elder sister Adah, who prefers dumping her in crappy conditions. We already know she’s a drug addict, but there are other peculiarities: she eats toothpaste, she never blinks, she eats a lot because ‘the pills make her hungry’ etc. She exasperates everyone including the audience, and yet our noble hero, who’s intrigued.

There’s festivity in the air, with much of the scenes taking place during sangeet and sagaai. Relatives camp at both homes, which includes a champu who’s enamored by Chopra. Their presence, leading to inane mini-scenes, bothered me instead of entertaining. Nothing made me laugh. Everyone from Parineeti’s side are Gujaratis, and so were most of the audience at my theatre. Gujaratis usually don’t mind laughing at harmless jokes at their expense, and even Jai Ho’s unfunny caricatures of Gujaratis generated a lot of laughs. Here there were none. Jokes fell flat and the theatre silent. I didn’t expect much from Siddharth, and didn’t much either. Parineeti, whom I absolutely adored in Shuddha Desi Romance, should’ve chosen a better script. The basket case she plays needs more than just love to cure her. Maybe a room at the de-addiction center.

Gunday claims its pehelwan protagonists played by Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor are blood brothers. The dialog ‘Two Dil Ek Jan’ is spoken often to reinforce this. But the audience surely knows better! For whatever it claims, Gunday plays like a love story between two men who cloak their homosexual impulses under feigned macho-giri. The girl here is plainly a temporary yet fatal (and fetching cos it’s the stunning Priyanka Chopra) diversion.

The great American critic Roger Ebert had a similar opinion when he reviewed the unfunny Hollywood film This Means War. It starred Chris Pine and Tom Hardy as two alarmingly close CIA agents and “buddies” who simultaneously seduce Reese Witherspoon. Gunday could be retitled ‘Naughty Munde’ and made more sense!

Ali Abbas Zafar, who debuted with Meri Brother Ki Dulhan, a movie also about two dapper men and an irresistible girl, has unintentionally made a gay love story.

This is no Dedh Ishqiya, a film with deliberate undertones of lesbianism between its female leads, and that’s what makes Gunday so side-splittingly awkward at times. Before my comments are ranted off as ‘homophobic’, I’d like to clarify that I wholeheartedly support equal rights to love and marry. If a film about homosexuals looks thoroughly unconvincing and ‘straight’, I’d rubbish it too. Now here are my arguments as to why the male leads Bala (Arjun) and Bikram (Ranveer) seem like lovers.

The most hilariously symbolic one –they wear matching PJs with large heart-shaped design on the pichwada. They share the bed. They mud-wrestle in a slow-mo sequence with expressions that hint they’re lovin’ it. Unconvinced? Okay, hear this. There’s a scene in which these angry young men pound each other in an abandoned warehouse after one mistakenly believes he’s been betrayed. After a bout of punching-punching-and-kicking-kicking, they pause and stare into each other’s eyes like raging bulls. Then they charge, the camera going slow-mo again. Now it’s usually the hero who does his own ‘shirt-ripping’. Here the two men rip each other’s shirt to resume fighting bare-chested. It’s more a strip than a rip! And to top it, the instrument supplying background music is a Spanish guitar. It’s the ending that reinforces their dostana, but since I’ll be forced to transgress my no-spoiler rule, I’d rather leave it to your imagination.

The mention of coal-mafia in the film’s promos would’ve brought to your mind Anurag Kashyap’s hard-hitting Gangs of Wasseypur. However, this being a Yash Raj film, there’s hardly any violence that’ll disturb. And if you’re looking forward to learn a thing or to either on partition or the 70s or illegal coal business or the underworld, there are no notes to take. For Gunday is set in the Yash Raj’s fancy fantasy world of Calcutta in the 70s, which means you’ll get a ride through the obvious (a) a durga pooja where each extra has been hired from the modeling industry (b) a dazzling Cabaret number (c) a visit to the machi-mart (with poor dead fishes being used as weapons in one fight), and (d) non-Bengali supporting cast hopelessly attempting the bhalobashi accent. Okay, what else? Oh, yeah ‘partition’ and ‘immigration’. The movie justifies the heroes’ aggression with a backstory of them as ‘underdogs’ wronged and ill-treated in their childhood. Irrfan Khan, playing cop-in-pursuit A.C.P. Satyajit Sarkar, recounts their legend, beginning with the time they were about ten of age.

The child actors take on rough and tough roles, showing more bravado and shaanpatti than Jamal and buddie Salim from Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. They’re supple and strong too, jumping into an open train carriage from a ramp at a distance like record long-jump athletes. The story tells they’ve taken close to ten years to expand their coal business, begun early. And yet, like rookies, they’re still doing the rangdam patti of leaping into carriages and nicking coal.

But we are to blindly accept that they somehow rule over Calcutta. There’s an unconvincing montage sequence showing market diversification as evidence. So whenever they threaten to create tabahi, you can only imagine them shooting a few cops and creating a minor stampede. Kingpins of Calcutta, meri jooti! The production design evinces effort and polish, but it’s noticeably sanitized to get the Yash Raj look. Glitz triumphs over the ordinary, the grime and the ugliness you’d expect from this world.

Arjun repeats his dadagiri, rowdy rascal act from Ishaqzaade and Aurangzeb and makes Bala embarrassingly insipid. When he’s around Priyanka, both he and Ranveer, overbearingly hammy, switch to a puppy dog look in a jiffy. Priyanka plays a cabaret dancer named Nandita but with a dirty little secret of her own. And the film drops this implausible twist like a wet brick. We go “Aah! I knew this crap would happen!” because the film doesn’t even try making her character suspenseful or mysterious until that point. Classic Bollywood masala – loud, wobbly, random and inconsistent. At least Irrfan’s act is a relief; he’s done such roles countless times but he plays it (in his own words) larger-than-life here, which is a change from the somber, brooding character he usually takes. Sadly, everything else in Gunday is thanda and thakela.

One By Two

One By Two screams AMATEUR post opening credits until the very end. On a report card, I’d put it this way:

Story – another bastard progeny of the ‘Wake Up Protagonist(s)’/‘Follow Your Dreams’/’Find You Real Self’ genre

Comments: A dreadful trailer forewarned me of previously released Yaariyan’s quality, so I avoided it. Two catchy numbers – Khushfehmiyan and I’m Just Pakaoed and promising promos got me excited for One by Two. Just got one likeable character in the entire film and a satisfactory end that together make ten minutes of the film’s runtime.

And the rest? Well, to call it dragging is an understatement. Remember those fitness videos in which a lissome, smiling female trainer would pep you up to perform a perfect split the way she’s doing it, and all you can do is widen your legs a bit until you felt a sharp pain shooting through your thunder thighs and then groan. The film seems that stretched, straining to move beyond each scene. By interval, I sighed five times. Placed my cell-phone under my chin to support my head from dropping asleep. By the end, I was hyperventilating and nearly zoned out. 140 minutes have never felt so soul-suckingly tedious.
A stylized representation would’ve helped this story. It’s necessary that we sense the director’s own commentary on the film’s various characters. Sofia Copolla and Harmony Korine shared their perspectives on Generation Y materialism in their films ‘Bling Ring’ and ‘Spring Breakers’ respectively. Sam Mendes’ American Beauty stylized both characters and situations while dealing with themes of loneliness and disconnection. In his directorial debut Don Jon, Joseph Gordon Levitt too successfully explored the subject of loss of intimacy in the Internet-driven world, not exactly unique, by stylizing his characters. Hong Kong Wong Kar-Wai used hypnotic music and camerawork in his debut Chungking Express to enliven sequences that had actors doing trivial stuff. Maneesh Sharma’s Shuddha Desi Romance offered an interesting take on marriage and live-in relationship.

Couldn’t Devika Bhagat, both the director and writer of One By Two, having penned scripts like Manorama Six Feet Under, Aisha and Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl, come up with something original, fresh or flavorful? She films interactions between secondary characters using close ups, shifting the focus to the dialogues than their effect on the protagonists. It seems she’s never heard of such a term as ‘off-screen sound’, which helps in streamlining the various actions of differing importance in scenes. In short, if every character is captured, if every dialogue is spoken in close-up, we assume what’s being said is important. Hence in One By Two, the nameless judges and anchor of a dance competition get to speak (that too complete sentences) in close-up or mid-shots even though their dialogues are of little importance. Why is Bhagat so keen on hearing them? Why does she spend aeons on dance sequences by unknown extras? Her cutaway shots during supposedly humorous sequences barely register a chuckle.

Her storytelling often muddles up as she tries juggling too many things. It opens like this. His name’s Amit Sharma; her name’s Samara Shah. His girlfriend breaks up with him; Samara meanwhile hooks up with her dance instructor. He hates his day job working on computers, and sulks aplenty post breakup; she quits the dance troupe after her instructor confronts her for hitting on other men while maintaining that their relationship remain casual. His mother keeps hunting for prospective bahu; she on the other hand takes looks after her alcoholic single mom. His hidden talent is music; we often find her swimming. He wants his ex-girlfriend back; she wants to win a dance competition. The two never meet face to face until the end, but each’s action affects the other.

For example, Amit rigs and manipulates the dance competition’s voting results so the best dancer is evicted; he does this to get the producer, also his ex-girlfriend’s current boyfriend, fired. Unfortunately, Samara gets the best audience response and is evicted through his manipulation. Life lessons such as ‘You are beautiful, you are kind. Never underestimate yourself’ to ‘Share your problems. Don’t get beaten down by life’ are sermonized throughout.

Certain sequences are inexplicable; one has an imaginary crowd following Samara in a herd-like manner as she listens to music on her portable audio player. It reminded me of the song and dance sequence from Amy Adams starrer Enchanted except the crowd here seemed clueless as to why they were following her. Samara befriends a Mumbai-cha-tapori who’s a fellow participant in the dance competition, and he’s a goddamn eyesore throughout. As Amit, Abhay Deol whines and sulks too much, while Preeti Desai, Abhay’s girlfriend in real life, can’t handle Samara’s heavy-duty scenes. I didn’t care for any of the supporting characters (the two playing Amit’s besties especially drove me nuts) except Shishika’s, who is the sole spunky presence in the entire film; she plays Amit Sharma’s marriage prospective arranged by his mummy, and is the only source of oxygen in a film that suffocates us with Amit’s paneer-induced farts. Yes, a hundred years of film, and fart jokes still exist. What a pity!

Note: These reviews got deleted from ourvadodara.in, a site I no longer work for. So am posting the missing reviews here.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Rating: 100%

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street plays out like staged storylines from WWE episodes back during its TV-14 era, albeit with an overdrive of over-the-top lewdness, crassness and rambunctiousness that may throw off audience members who go to the show expecting to root for ‘faces’ (i.e. the good guys) over heels (the bad guys). There is a growing misconception that the film glorifies its protagonist’s tales of debauchery and decadence instead of upbraiding it. It can’t be denied though that a temporary absorption of his rapacious, power-hungry attitude is felt, but our system soon filters it out when the film offers its healing therapy. It often breaks the fourth wall and works with the energy levels of a hyperkinetic farce to ingeniously establish an invisible barrier between us and the film. Unlike his last venture ‘Hugo’, Scorsese has no intentions to ‘transport us to the fictional world’; instead, we sit back, we howl with laughter and are given enough breathable space to think. Even in WWE, fan support for heels usually lasts only momentarily, after which we either switch support to a ‘face’ or anticipate the heel’s epic downfall.

The Wolf of Wall Street is a terrifyingly bold and far-reaching cautionary tale and a middle-finger gesture against the imbibition of greed and cold-hearted narcissism prevalent in many of the corporate cultures not only in capitalist economies but also in transitional economies nowadays. The grooming generally begins in business schools, with guest lectures and seminars on ‘How to Make it Big after B-School’, usually delivered in a highly charismatic rhetoric by “exciting entrepreneurs” or “inspirational management gurus”, whose job (exceptions exist, of course) is to make you feel pathetic for not making any money and then to groom you to continue feeling pathetic once you’ve earned some coz somebody in the world makes more money than you do (trust me – studying in one right now). Contentment is frowned upon as a sign of defeat, while covetousness (marketed as ‘passion’ or ‘drive’) is sought after – how shall the market forces function otherwise?

Stepping into the real world means acknowledging its harsh realities and cold truths and then not feeling guilty about it. At workplace you’re told to make it big but ‘not to the detriment of another’s livelihood’, but of course, the stipulation in quotation marks in only practicable in theory, right? Because in the end, its money that speaks, matters and decides the worth of an individual. So the warm and radiant faces beaming in job ads are neither warm nor customer-oriented – that’s nothing but a marketing gimmick meant for gullible customers. Scorsese takes pot-shots precisely at this ‘Get Rich or Die a Loser’ generation who possess a devil may care attitude towards ethical and moral considerations. The pay-off of ‘holding little to the imagination’ and filling it to the brim whether in sex, or profanity, or drugs or malice, is a mammothian-length master work that holds a carnival mirror to the world. Its cutting-edge contemporary in its storytelling, and as hard-hitting, impressive and relevant as Jason Reitman’s Up in The Air, David Fincher’s Social Network, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange or Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. This belongs to the rare category of being ‘the film of the moment’, and it punches its message square into our faces.

The biggest irony in the film, as reports have already mentioned, is that Jordan Belfort is happily minting money now, in addition to his book sales (adapted to screen by Terence Winters) and work as a motivational speaker, with the million dollars he received for movie rights; Wikipedia states he’s not even fulfilled his restitution obligations after being indicted in 1997 for 22 months for security fraud and money laundering. The scumbag’s soul may be lacquered with all the drugs he’s taken in the past, and at least hundred rebirths would be needed before it gets an absolution. Maybe he doesn’t even want one, and is only doing his ‘motivation thing’ to stay out of the FBI’s radar. We never shall know; he has used his natural ability to lie through his pearly-white teeth to mulct others for years without drawing much suspicion. The closing scene is telling: now instead of his devious stock brokers, its hopeless sales agents who look up to modern Mammon with misty-eyed adulation.

You can practically check off every possible option on his charge-sheet of sins. He gets a preliminary pep-talk from an unconscionable grease-ball (a cameo appearance by Matthew McConaughey which is so awesome the trailers showcase him a hell more than the other supporting cast) after joining a blue chip company. The instructions are simple: do drugs, jerk-off and screw people better. There’s logic in here.

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, a fictional account of the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler, a pornographic actor during the late 80s and early 90s, it was drugs that charged him as well as led to his crash. Take any big name in the music industry (Beatles, Bob Marley, Courtney Love, Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga) – old and new – drugs again. In scamming people, compunction eats up the soul unless it’s drug-coated.

After being laid off post stock market crash in 1987, he chances upon a penny stock boiler room that (falsely, of course) promises its customers 50% of their invested amount. He takes over the firm, renames it Stratton Oakmont to appeal to well-off investors, employs acquaintances and winnows them till they sound as glib as him, and then expands to employ over thousand stockbrokers who congregate under one roof to f### people up. There’s an adrenaline-driven hyper-masculinity glinting on each face, both male and female. This is one deadly community of mercenary scamsters who’re even more dangerous, absolutely remorseless (can’t fathom these guys having actual ‘life’ outside work) and less principled than the gangsters from Godfather series, Goodfellas or Departed. Their idea of fun and philanthropy is fulfilling a female employee’s wish of getting larger breast implants by challenging her to shave her head off (reminded me of a storyline from WWE involving CM Punk and his cultish clan), getting a pet chimpanzee to office, holding a midget-throwing contest (there’s an extended scene in which Belfort discusses ‘dos and don’ts with midgets’ which is simply fantastic and probably half-improvised), hand-standing during work, bullying employees who are ‘neat’, bringing in prostitutes who are categorized into ‘blue chips’, ‘NASDAQs’ and ‘pink sheets’, popping drugs like M&Ms (of course) and other such things – this is during working hours. Outside work, at lavish parties organized by Belfort, they’re even wilder, and wasted with Quaaludes (the film informs about the drug’s history).

Belfort’s wife Teresa is initially supportive of him – he finds her unadventurous and screws around with a gorgeous blonde of Irish-British-Italian-Dutch origin named Naomi Lapaglia. When caught red-handed, he doesn’t even try stopping Teresa like most conventional heroes would; three days later, Naomi shifts to his home, and eighteen months after that, she sheds off her elegance and turns all screechy and ghetto soon after marriage. Belfort also brings in ‘angry dad’ Max and mom Leah to handle his finances. The FBI, led by Patrick Denham, begins to sniff around his files to find for incriminatory loopholes, and just after interval, there’s a scene between Belfort and Denham that takes a page from Tarantino’s book in the way it lets tension bubble underneath the conversation. Real feelings peak in towards the end, when the situation involves Belford and Naomi’s child, but there’s very fleeting. There’s too much corrosion already for feelings to last beyond a few minutes.

Leading this suit-and-tie gangland is Leonardo Di Caprio, who’s performed a number of unhinged or tormented characters in his career and nailed each and every f**king one of them, whether it’s What’s Eating Gilbert The Grape, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, Inception, J Edgar or Django Unchained or Great Gatsby. He isn’t just consistent but also conscious about the films he picks. Here, he’s wickedly entertaining with an enviable screen presence that’s just addictive to watch. His Oscar moments come in two scenes – a) a laugh-out-loud scene featuring Quaaludes and a long drive back home and b) his violent confrontation with Naomi. Belfort’s compatriot and ‘married to cousin’ dirt-bag Donnie Azoff is played by Jonah Hill who holds his own in front of an actor of Caprio’s caliber, and steals a scene involving him, Brad Bodnick (played by Shane Bernthal) and a briefcase stashed with cash. The supporting cast marinates the animalistic intensity of the film in forming the foundation of a pyramid of cards that’s destined to tumble.

Looking at the current political scenario, it seems people need a leader who can restore their faith in the financial market and roll some money into their bank accounts. It wouldn’t be a stretch to see someone like Belford arise popularity in this clout. If Belfort decides to contest in the upcoming elections, maybe he shall become President. We’ve already seen the Republicans pushing in Sara Palin in the past, haven’t we? At least one knows his shit.

The Lego Movie

Rating: 100%

As a kid, I owned a Lego set. Of course, in India, there wasn’t much variety to play with in those days. I missed all those franchise themed toys it came up with over the years and was stuck with a Mr. Nobody. And all I remembered building was a little house with the colorful Lego bricks of many colors. I hardly recollect talking to my toys the way I my ten-year old cousin does today. He’s got no Lego set, but he spends his hours guiding, cheering, goading and even praying for his Transformers, Spiderman, Batman and other action figures and his admirable Beyblade collection. The Lego Movie is so spectacularly inventive both in humor and action I bet even a kid who hasn’t touched Lego pieces nor talked to his toys would take no time falling in love with it. In case you’re a movie buff drawn to animation and adventure films, you’d find yourself recalling scenes from films such as Toy Story, Wall E, Rango, Kung Fu Panda and its sequel, Shrek 3, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Star Wars and many others (my mind went back to The Truman Show, Kill Bill Volume 1 and even to the 1927 Fritz Lang classic Metropolis) while watching The Lego Movie, but you never shall go “Oh wait, that’s lifted straight out of …” the way people went “Yeah, it’s Finding Nemo meets Madagascar meets Lion King” after sitting through the 2006 film The Wild. You might, on the other hand, say “Wow! This is on par with Disney’s Toy Story and perhaps better than most blockbuster animated films released by major studios in the past few years!”. Yes, The Lego Movie is that awesome.

It greets you with a sick sweet earworm called ‘Everything is awesome’ which has an entire city of ordinary Lego characters – construction workers, crane operators, traffic cops, business men, homemakers etc – celebrating their mundane daily routine as if it’s they’re leading the most exciting lives imaginable. The hook and chorus of this anthem is as catchy as Kylie Minogue’s All The Lovers (I could hear Minogue in the back of my head while the song was playing) and sets the tone for how we are to perceive this world. Obviously, this place is no wonderland; in fact, most fascist regimes begin with an introduction of how gullible and ignorant its citizens are, perfectly happy being subjugated by their dictator.

In this case, he is aptly named Lord Business, and his Machiavellian plans include instructing the entire city how to lead their lives, feeding them the same content day after day and restricting people from travelling to foreign lands (which reminds of tighter immigration laws being imposed by developed countries). And yeah, he also plans to turn the entire world static with his fearsome weapon: Kragle Super Glue. We get a preview of his machine’s powers when he uses it on a cop’s parents and later brings in a Nail Polish Remover, another deadly gadget in his arsenal, to smudge off the cop’s ‘good’ face. Unfortunately for this Dolores Umbridge of Lego Land, there’s an uprising underway as the powerful, creative, magical forces comprising of Marvel superheroes, Star Wars characters, pirates, Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Dumbledore, Millhouse etc join hands to dissolve his powers over the land. All they await is the arrival of the ‘Special’, as a wise old man named Vitruvius (an Obi-Wan Kenobi kinda figure) has prophesized that only he can bring peace. And as underdog movies go, here’s when our hero Emmet stumbles into the picture.

A wide-eyed, spirited construction worker whose brain hasn’t conceived anything except an idea of a bunk-bed cum couch (the film allows us a sneak preview into his empty head too) is or rather becomes the ‘Special’ one after accidently discovering the Piece of Resistance which can help foil Lord Business’ scheme. He is soon taken into questioning by top cops, and it’s funny when they switch between good cop and bad cop simply by swirling their heads. Our clueless hero is subjected to torture until a mysterious girl saves him at the nick of time. She goes by the name Wyldstyle, and she’s the same woman whose sight bewitched him at the construction site, which by the way led to him accidently finding the Piece of Resistance she spent years hunting for. This non-Disney, non-princess female character holds our interest with her distinctive characterization. Apart from sporting an unconventional ‘punk rebel chick’ look complete with a black costume and hair dyed in black streaks, Wyldstyle also shows sides to her character we hardly expect in most animated films. From Vitruvius (who goes underground by becoming the piano-player at a Western saloon, hence reminding me of sword-master Hattori Hanzo from Kill Bill), we learn she was an outcast even in her childhood, a girl who kept changing identities in searching for her true self. Her boyfriend is Batman (you heard me right!), and while she claims he’s the best man for her, she says it by rote the way Emmet recites ‘Everything is awesome’. The filmmakers subtly hint Batman’s lack of concern towards her and her over-eagerness to please. And while she hates the brainwashing propaganda of Everything is Awesome, she sings it perfectly when compelled to. Yes, the song’s super catchy indeed, and Wyldstyle is a memorable part of The Lego Movie. She does eventually reveal her true name to someone, and I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to guess who that person is.
What does come as a surprise is the live-action sequence during the climax. That’s the crowning moment of The Lego Movie. I won’t tell you what happens, but what I can assert is that anybody can identify with this profoundly moving sequence. It’s all the more remarkable that the touching sequence features not thespian Meryl Streep but SNL comedian Will Ferrell.

What else? Well your eyes surprisingly take no time adjusting to the deliberately pixilated-animation, and there are as many laugh-out-loud moments (although G and PG rated only) as there were in Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street. While sex and language drove away some audiences from the latter film, there’s nothing that should keep you from buying tickets to one of the most magical movies of the year.

Carrie

Rating: 60%

Summary: Miles ahead of the textbook jump-scare junk in the name of horror. Pretty decent as a psychological horror film, with spectacular effects. As a character study, lacking.

Carrie can’t be included in the list of textbook jump-scare junk most audiences have taken a fondness to post James Wan’s sleeper hit The Conjuring. For about an hour and fifteen minutes, the film shares the horrors endured by its protagonist Carrie White, but they’re mostly psychological.

She is bullied and catcalled at school both by popular cliques as well as regular kids, her tormentors largely female. She has a sickly-looking Christian fanatic for a mother who subjugates and punishes her on a regular basis; the basket-case holds antiquated views aging back to Adam and Eve and ‘the first sin of love-making’, regarding her daughter the fruit of her sin.

In many ways, Carrie would remind us of Luna Lovegood, the outcast from Harry Potter series, or an X-men character except with the self-esteem levels of Nina from Black Swan or Raj Koothrappali (the Indian guy in The Big Bang Theory) in the company of the fairer sex, with a parent as cracked (though not as sadistic) as Gertrude Baniszewski, the caretaker of Sylvia Likens, a teenager tortured to death by her own children, and class-mates as vapid, uncaring and spiteful as well… 21st century teenagers just about anywhere in the world. She discovers she can move objects without touching, a superpower known as telekinesis. Unfortunately for her, Dumbledore does not exist in this world otherwise she’d be an Auror at Ministry of Magic by now.

While her powers trigger automatically, they remain within her control as she unleashes hell on Earth (Ewen High School to be specific) which curtains a more vengeful image over Brian De Palma’s Carrie; those who’ve watched the Oscar nominated 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s horror tragedy will remember the previous Carrie as a pale-skinned nervous wreck with freakish powers beyond her control. Hence, this Carrie eagerly participates in decimating those who’ve done her wrong with a remorselessness equaling Voldemort, Harry Potter’s prime antagonist. But as she’s consciously performing this murderous ritual, she is merciful towards people who’ve been warm and supportive; she may strike us as a kiddo version of Beatrix or The Bride from The Kill Bill – a revengeful heroine.

In between these two forms – timid and aggressive – we are briefly introduced to a ‘normal’ Carrie, an introverted teenager yearning to be accepted by society. This girl has similar ambitions of any straight (the ambitions remain the same for gay except the ‘boy’ part) teenage girl of her age – to go to the prom attired in her favorite gown and dance with the boy she likes and if lucky, get voted as prom queen. She has inhibitions cultivated since childhood she has trouble getting over – she won’t dance to fast numbers and would hesitate stepping in even for the slow, romantic ones. Tommy, a kind-hearted popular classmate (think Finn Hudson from Glee) and her prom partner, is understanding, smooth and careful enough not to be pushy and rush things with her. He wants her evening to be memorable, but it’s just a one-night thing.

It’s a consolation, an act of atonement from Tommy’s girlfriend Sue, who feels ashamed of herself for participating in a particularly nasty incident of bullying involving Carrie; it’s a well-known scene among horror buffs in which the girls throw tampons at Carrie while she’s screaming in the shower room, naively thinking she’s bleeding to death when it’s actually her first menstrual period.

The prom scenes that form the coupling evoke an episode from Disney show, albeit ending with a heavy dose of F-words, pig blood and Final Destination-style violence. The cause is the ultimate prank played on poor Carrie by her spoilt tormentor Chris, who extracts revenge by dropping a bucket of blood of a pig killed by her and her boyfriend Billy. She was the one who riled up the other girls to pick on her, it was she who filmed the entire event in the shower room (set in the modern day, there are enough social networking sites to further the humiliation) and got suspended from school and banned for refusing to perform a detention ordered by gym teacher Miss Desjardin as well as uploading the embarrassing video onto the internet. When most other girls, including Sue, refrain from supporting her defiance, she, in a way, becomes an outcast. In this film, we’re introduced to her father as a rich schmuck who most likely gave little time to mend his daughter’s ways.

The film also makes Sue an outcast in the eyes of ‘pretty, hip girls’ for sacrificing prom to make Carrie happy, and introduces us to her mother in a single scene taking place at Carrie’s mother Margaret’s dressmaking store. Kimberley Pierce, the film’s director, hints at themes including role of parenting on a child’s psychology and clearly demarcates the personalities of Carrie, Sue and Chris and the paths taken by each to give us a moral lesson on empathy, forgiveness and sacrifice by granting a happy ending to one of the girls – can you guess who that is? Tragically, it isn’t the girl who most deserved her revenge.

This film isn’t a big leap for Pierce, who debuted as a director in 1999 with Boys Don’t Cry, a fascinating character study based on a true story of a girl who identifies herself as a man and gets raped and murdered by her male acquaintances once her secret is revealed.

These aren’t full-bodied characterizations, although they have the potential to be. Although Pierce’s message is pretty straightforward, as highlighted in the film’s closing scene, she leaves potential dimensions under-explored, such as Chris’ or even Sue’s motivations. This could’ve been a three-woman character study in a horror setup, and Pierce has the balls to do that. She winds up too soon, seeming more casual this time.

I found Carrie a lot more entertaining than the audience members around me, being a big fan of psychological horror films. People expecting jump scares wouldn’t get any. People expecting a gore-fest shall have to remain patient till the halfway mark. The special effects are spectacular, and there’s massive bloodshed to munch popcorn to once Carrie gets berserk. And more than Chloë Grace Moretz, who does a decent job portraying Carrie after delighting us playing the rosy, wide-eyed Isabelle in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, this film’s worth catching for Julianne Moore, who dons a gaunt, batshit crazy look, mumbles Biblical verses with fanatical fervor and mesmerizes us.

Note: My first review in months. Gotta brush up on my skills and get back in form!

Rating: 60%

Summary: The Giver may work for attention-deficit gen-Y audiences as its carefully sanitized to cater to them. But to me, a 21 year old with a voracious appetite for books and films, the film is slightly disappointing.

Cast

Brenton Thwaites – Jonas

Jeff Bridges – The Giver

Cameron Rush – Fiona

Asher – Cameron Monaghan

Chief Elder – Meryl Streep

Phillip Noyce directs The Giver, an adaptation of Lois Lowry’s award winning social sci-fi themed book of the same name. In an interview, actress Meryl Streep, who plays a role in the film, hailed him as a “pure, pure filmmaker with great taste”. It’s a noteworthy compliment coming from an artiste of her stature, and yet entirely debatable considering Streep’s questionable predilection for directors such as Phillida Lloyd. Remember her? She’s the one that dropped not one but two rancid bombs on unsuspecting audiences, namely Mamma Mia and Iron Lady, both starring Streep. Unlike Lloyd, Noyce has a relatively extensive career as a film director with over thirty seven years of experience. Therefore, it would be highly biased on my part to judge his abilities based on the only two works that I’ve managed to catch, The Giver and Salt.

Now Salt was one kickass frenzied summer blockbuster about a double agent played by the incomparable Angelina Jolie; the film was so densely packed in gravity-defying action sequences it could insouciantly forgo expositions without caring a damn. The Giver on the other hand needs a proper one.

It is here that Noyce falters. He goes for this lazy videogame/music-video-style opening where on-screen text swiftly list out the norms that the Community, the world of this film, has to follow. Jonas, played by a handsome Brenton Thwaites, is introduced and we immediately learn that he’s ‘different’ for he can see flashes of color in an otherwise black-and-white world governed by rules.

Within no time, in a cut-and-move-on-to-the-next-one style, Noyce captures interactions between Jonas, his friends Fiona (Cameron Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan) and his ‘assigned’ parents (played by Alexander Skarsgard and Katie Holmes). So there’s just two dialogues for us to do our math and figure out that his mom is a miserably uptight bitc… I mean woman. Logic tells us it’s a utopian society, but shouldn’t we as viewers able to feel it as one that’s terribly wrong to root for Jonas and The Giver (played by acting titan Jeff Bridges, who also produced the film) as they fight to bring a change?

Other teen-centric films – Hunger Games, Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland – as well as films that pitted one guy against the world (Bee Movie, Elysium) did bother with setting up their characters more thoroughly and it helped. On the other hand, Noyce’s economical hackneyed (Jonas’ self-introductory narration in the first scene itself) exposition doesn’t. I didn’t understand the logic behind the editing either – if the whole purpose of the establishing scenes is to depict ‘sameness’ in an absurdly sterilized society where emotions have no place and individual opinions matter less, shouldn’t the camera cut less often so go ‘Damn! Living here must be terrible!’ instead of hurriedly jumping from character to character like every scene’s equally momentous?

Both Salt and The Giver work on a similar premise – a character of mystery fights against the system while embarking on an ambiguous challenge that ultimately brings good to the world – but while the former film doesn’t count on plot as its strengths, the latter has to, and so, most adult viewers would expect a meatier offering from Noyce and the film’s writers Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide.

The film progresses to Jonas’ sessions with The Giver, after the young lad is chosen as ‘The Receiver’ by watchdogs of the Community known as the Elders, led by Chief Elder (Meryl Streep, who doesn’t have any heavy lifting to do but gets her ‘Meryl Monologue’ towards the end of the film which she unsurprisingly nails). We see him learning about each and everything eliminated by the Elders to attain ‘utopia’ – emotions, colors, arts, seasons, dreams, memories and any other factor that has the slightest chance to cause pain and suffering. While not being as magical as moments between Harry Potter and Dumbledore as they glimpsed through memories of the past using The Pensieve, these scenes are impressively filmed and well acted.

Just as Alice was the only one who could bring peace in Wonderland or Harry Potter the only wizard who could defeat Voldemort, Jonas is the only person who can use his special position to restore the world to its previous state by crossing the ‘boundary’. But along the sessions, he develops a conflicted view about the past – while he cannot understand why the Elders needed to eliminate love or why they dispensed with snow or did away with different races and animal species, he is disturbed by man’s selfish urges to hurt and kill. The Elders have managed to suppress all these urges in humans using ‘morning injections’ which, unless skipped, worked similarly to lobotomy. The Elders also kill by the way, only that they use lethal medicine and term it as ‘release to elsewhere’ without any human having the mental capacity to realize that its murder.

They keep a constant check on everybody using intercom, and there’s no such thing as invasion of privacy in town. So if Chief Elder needs to have a word with Jonas, all she needs to do is pop up as a hologram into his home.

As I was watching The Giver, a lot other movies into my head – other young adult fiction, most of which I’ve mentioned above, the animated short ‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore’ (the transformation of a black-and-white world to color), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, The Lego Movie, The Truman Show, The Clockwork Orange, Citizen Kane – and I bet each and every one of these films shall stay in memory far longer than The Giver would. This movie seems to have been carefully sanitized to work for attention-deficit gen-Y audiences, and if I were to put myself in the position of a 13-15 year old average teenager, I guess The Giver would’ve worked perfectly for me. But to me, a 21 year old with a voracious appetite for books and films, The Giver comes as a bit of a disappointment.